Monday, 14 December 2015

Fall of the House of History: Our Past Was Erased by Catastrophes

“The
evidence, decades-old now and not even controversial amongst the comet
community, [is] that an exceptionally large, low-inclination, short-period
comet has been orbiting in our neighbourhood for about 20,000 years… In such a
disintegrating environment there is a reasonable probability of a catastrophic
encounter with debris in the comet trail….”

-Leading astronomer Dr
Bill Napier of the Cardiff University Centre for Astrobiology

This is the
same comet that broke into multiple large fragments and caused the extinction
level event between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, described in my new book Magicians
of the Gods. The comet impacts destroyed an advanced prehistoric civilization
and almost completely wiped it from human memory, leaving its traces only in
myths and traditions and in carefully buried time-capsules, like Gobekli Tepe
in Turkey, where the truth of our past is set to come out.

We are
presently passing through the debris stream of the same comet, as indeed the
earth does twice every year (in late June/early July and in late October/early
November). As I report in Magicians of the Gods, Napier and his colleagues are
concerned that several large ‘dark’ fragments of the original giant comet still
lurk, shrouded by dust, within the stream — which we know as the Taurid meteor
stream The stream is 30 million kilometers wide and it takes the earth 12 days
to pass through it on each occasion. I wrote about the implications of this for
our future in the final chapter of Magicians of the Gods. Rendering the Taurid
meteor stream safe IS within the limits and capacities of our current
technology. It could be done — so no need for fear, doom and gloom. No need for
ours to become the next lost civilization. The problem, however, is that the
human species presently seems to lack the will for rational and responsible
action, and to be far too choked up with fear, hatred and suspicion to
undertake a grand project for the collective benefit of mankind, preferring
instead to devote the big budgets to destructive and dangerous military
spending and the insanity of mutually assured nuclear destruction.

Acting
almost as though it has been tasked to play down threats that don’t require a
military solution – and thus might compete for military budgets – NASA
consistently seeks to understate dangers to humanity emanating from its
specific area of interest, namely our cosmic environment. In particular it
frequently reassures us that none of the asteroids or comets it has so far
identified will come close enough to impact Earth anytime in the foreseeable
future: “All known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids have less than a 0.01 percent
chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years,” (NASA, August 2015).

What this
statement disguises, however, is that NASA actually has no idea how many
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHA’s) exist. It can only report the number it
has spotted so far, presently totalling 1,635 (of which 877 have diameters of a
kilometre or more). It’s true there’s very little likelihood of any of these
KNOWN objects hitting Earth in the next 100 years (see the linked video here
which shows all asteroids — including a great many non-hazardous asteroids — so
far discovered (up to September 2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKKg4lZ_o-Y&sns=em).
However, it’s the as-yet unidentified and UNKNOWN objects on earth-crossing
orbits that should really concern us. According to some estimates, NASA has so
far located barely 1 per cent of the total population of PHA’s, with 99 per
cent , i.e. more than 100,000, still awaiting discovery.

It therefore
comes as a timely wake-up call from the universe that on 31 October a
previously undiscovered PHA, thought to be of cometary origin, had a relatively
close encounter with the earth. This object was not located until 10 October.
It was travelling blisteringly fast and it had a diameter in the range of half
a kilometre. See here: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/halloween-skies-to-include-dead-comet-flyby
In this way, past, present and future are interlinked and what Magicians of the
Gods is really all about are the implications of the comet impacts between
12,800 and 11,600 years ago for our understanding of history. It’s my
contention that this new scientific information means that the house of history
is built on foundations of sand.

When Magicians
of the Gods was published in the UK on 10 September, I was mocked in the
national media because the book references the serious suggestions of a number
of astronomers that our planet is in real and present danger of an encounter
with the fragments of a giant comet. I have no wish to invoke doom and gloom
but I felt it would be irresponsible of me NOT to report this, because the
evidence is that the Taurid meteor stream is the debris trail of a giant comet
that was thrown into the inner solar system by gravitational disturbances some
20,000 years ago and that broke into multiple fragments some of which hit the
earth 12,800 years ago, with further impacts 11,600 years ago. The result was a
sustained global cataclysm (known to geologists as the Younger Dryas) that was
accompanied by worldwide extinctions of animal species, and I suggest, by the
almost complete destruction of an advanced human civilization that had
flourished during the Ice Age.

None of
this, in my view, is a matter for gloom and doom. Instead I see it as a matter
for action. The technology already exists to sweep our cosmic environment clean
of potential threats and to ensure that we do not become the next lost
civilization. The problem, however, is that the human species presently seems
to lack the will for rational and responsible action, and to be far too choked
up with fear, hatred and suspicion to undertake a grand project for the
collective benefit of mankind, preferring instead to devote the big budgets to
destructive and dangerous military spending and the insanity of mutually
assured nuclear destruction.

The big
media have done their best to mis-represent Magicians of the Gods, but I remain
encouraged by the level of intelligent support for the book so far shown by the
general public. Publication in the United States is on 10 November, just two
weeks from today. Background on the book here: http://grahamhancock.com/magicians/.

Important
interview here with leading astronomer Dr Bill Napier of the Cardiff University
Centre for Astrobiology: http://bit.ly/1KSKMAt:

Cosmic
Tusk Interview: Bill Napier

The
Tusk has been interested for some time in conducting an occasional interview
with players in fields related to cosmic catastrophes in human times. So
much of the coverage of our subject is “ drive-by” journalism, with uninformed
reporters on deadline asking shallow, often misinformed, questions of key
scientists and then writing a story which barely informs. The subject deserves
something at least a little better. So, in a modest effort to add more depth to
the popular record than is commonly provided, I nominated our blog to try out a
few interviews.

It
was an easy call whom to approach first, Bill
Napier. He is a digital acquaintance of mine, a cool guy and a wiseman.
Astronomer, best-selling
popular novelist, frequent contributor to a 40 year canon of astronomical
justification for end times in the peopled past — Bill Napier is simply a
Tusk-kind-of-guy.

Napier
and his collaborators in the old country are even credited with their own
handle, “British
Neo-Catastrophists.” Post-Newton and Whiston, Post-Velikovsky, concurrent
with Alvarez but Pre-Firestone — shunned by NASA and employed by the Queen —
they are contributors to a cogent set of astronomical facts termed “Coherent Catastrophism,”
a body of evidence indicating that quite horrible cosmic encounters have
occurred in the human past.

Here
goes:

Astronomer and author Bill Napier

CT: Dr.
Napier, thanks for joining the Cosmic Tusk for our inaugural interview! How’s
the weather over there on the Emerald Isle?

A. Sunny at
the moment, but I’m not too far from the Atlantic and I can see clouds coming
our way. It’ll be wet and windy by the evening. Good whisky weather.

CT: My
kind of island, Bill. As many Tusk readers are aware, you and your many
collaborators, particularly Victor Clube, are known for maintaining in publications
since the 1970’s that a large comet entered our solar system ~20,000 years in
the past, began to progressively disintegrate, and left behind increasingly
diffuse streams of cometary material which periodically wreaked havoc on our
ancient ancestors. What first got you and Clube interested in
the disintegrating giant comet theory?

BN: My own
interest in impacts as having a catastrophic potential for life goes back to
about 1970, almost back to my student days. Victor Clube joined the Royal
Observatory at Edinburgh, where I worked, in the early 70s. He was interested
in the possibility that violent Galactic events might from time to time have
terrestrial consequences. It was very natural that we should put our heads
together on these topics, and we did so from the mid-70s onwards. We soon
realised that the Oort cloud is liable to disruption during the Sun’s orbit
around the Galaxy, flooding the planetary system with comets, and that there
are some really big ones out there. We had a primitive but working theory of
catastrophism by the late 70s (e.g. Napier & Clube,
Nature 282, 455, 1979 and more,
wherein we remarked that “historical records are a potential source of data for
testing our hypothesis.”). It was actually Fred Whipple at Harvard University
who first took the view that Comet Encke was the remnant of a much larger body,
and we picked up that idea and ran with it. The big puzzle for us was why the
Comet Encke progenitor went unrecorded in the historical record. Even at a
diameter of 20 km it would have been almost as bright as the full moon.

CT:
Interesting you say you were puzzled that a giant comet went unrecorded, Bill.
You must have later come to believe that these events were indeed “recorded,”
but in religious traditions and mythology, as you maintain in your books Cosmic
Winter and Cosmic Serpent. Was that realization subsequent to your astronomical
conclusions? Tell us how myth began to play a role in your studies.

BN: No
question, the astronomy came first. There were two components to this. The
likely impact rate of Tunguskas and super-Tunguskas made us wonder where these
things were in the historical record, and of course the disintegration
products, plainly visible in the sky, of a large progenitor comet provided
another where-is-it-in-the-record paradox. Victor had some ancient book by
Bellamy who had some strange ideas about disintegrating moons recorded in
ancient tales; all I could find in our local library was a book by Fontenrose
on Delphic myth. We started from there. It wasn’t long before we learned that
astronomical motifs of a catastrophist nature are to be found scattered
throughout ancient tales. And of course others had been there before us
throughout the centuries, all the way back to the classical authors.

CT:
Fontenrose and Bellamy? That’s obscure stuff the Tusk will have to follow up
on! I noticed that you provided Chapter
11 in respected science author Nick Bostrom’s book, Global Catastrophic Risks,
and referred to evidence from myth as obviously “qualitative,” and that “one
man’s unifying hypothesis is another’s Velikovskian fantasy.” Great quote. So
let’s turn to the quantitative evidence of a recent catastrophe. Outside the
work of the YDB team, where do think “traditional” evidence for determining the
frequency of impacts has gone wrong? Where do find quantitative evidence for
more frequent impacts that NASA, for instance, does not?

BN: The “traditional”
route was set in the 1970s and later, when it was generally assumed that Earth
crossers were perturbed out of the main asteroid belt. There was little inkling
of the big populations on the fringes of the planetary system, feeding into
unstable orbits between the giant planets. Impact hazard assessments based on
this model may still be fine for short timescales. Imagine, however, taking a
snapshot of a railway station. Depending on the time and date, you might see a
handful of cleaning staff, a rush hour crowd, or holiday time congestion. If
you use this single snapshot to predict tomorrow’s throughput, you could get it
spectacularly wrong. To get a reliable assessment you need to look at the
bigger picture, and the trouble with current impact estimates is that they
don’t. They assume statistical completeness, i.e. that the current situation is
typical. Chapman and Morrison, for example, estimate the probability of a
globally destructive impact over the next 10,000 years to be about 1%. I have
no idea what the real figure is, but I do know that on a timescale 30,000 or so
years, there’s an expectation that a comet with at least 100 times the mass of
the entire near-Earth asteroid system will enter a short-period orbit and
disintegrate in our neighbourhood. Comets break up by a variety of routes,
hierarchic fragmentation being a major one. Brief, strong surges of impact are
then a distinct possibility, rendering the Chapman/Morrison/Harris model more
or less irrelevant when it comes to assessing the hazard to civilisation.
Whereas this traditional route will tell us to expect a few hundred megaton
impact, yielding regional damage, the real encounter mechanics may be quite
different and may have global consequences. The good news is that we would
probably get plenty of warning. Dark comets emerging from the Halley system are
a different matter, but that hazard is unquantified.

As to when
this might have happened in the past, it’s long been known that the
zodiacal cloud is substantially overmassive in relation to the available supply
of dust, with David
Hughes for example concluding that `at some time in the last 1000 to
100,000 years, the cloud has benefited from a large and unusual mass
enhancement’. A
massive radar survey of meteors undertaken by Peter Brown’s Canadian group
in recent years, coupled with their dynamical modelling, has strengthened the
result that much of the zodiacal cloud came from the progenitor of Encke’s
comet and that it was an unusually large object. The destruction time of the
zodiacal cloud is something between 10,000 and 20,000 years, straddling the
Younger Dryas boundary.

Another way.
Consider the impact cratering record as recorded in the Earth Impact Database. The
impact record is dominated by episodes of multiple bombardment. I’ve labelled
these in the diagram, which plots only the best dated craters. We’ve
demonstrated in the refereed literature that (a) fragments from main belt
asteroid collisions fail by an order of magnitude to reproduce these episodes;
(b) comet showers from Oort cloud disturbances likewise; and (c) the known
population, size distribution and orbital flow of centaurs can account for the
record. (Most of the episodes coincide in time with major extinction events,
and the asterisks mark a couple of singlets that also coincide with big
extinctions. These impacts are generally too small individually to have caused
the mass extinctions and can only be proxies for some other astronomical
process, such as stratospheric dusting.) Considering all 184 impact structures
in the database, it turns out there is only one in the range 5–35 million years
(the Ries crater 24 km across). Using the traditional estimates, we expect
something like 17 land impacts to have made craters >20 km across over this
interval. Most of these should have been discovered, this being a relatively
recent era. It’s hardly credible that we have missed 16 out of 17 of them; the
dearth is real. Conversely, there seems to have been a surge of impact
cratering in the recent past relative to the long-term average. All this makes
sense if the prime impactors are derived from the breakup of large comets,
since their mass distribution is top-heavy and their input is erratic and
episodic. I think the Galactic environment also plays a role through disturbing
the Oort comet cloud, for example when we pass through spiral arms.

The
statistics don’t reveal any significant difference between the temporal
behaviour of large and small craters in this respect. The asteroid belt may
well be okay as a supplier of small impactors, incoming comets for larger ones,
but it’s not clear to me where the breakeven point lies. All three major
20th-century impacts (Tunguska,
British Guyana, Curuca River and
here)
coincided with our passage through major meteor streams, and the odds of this
are about 1000 to one against. Peter Brown and colleagues, in a
letter to Nature published last year, suggest that the number of impactors
up to Tunguska-sized is up to ten times higher than previous estimates based on
long-term lunar counts. Again, we’re looking at a flickering system.

CT:
Bill, you labeled the current understanding the “Chapman/Harris/Morrison”
model, referring respectively of course to Clark Chapman, Alan Harris,
and David
Morrison. These elderly gentlemen are US scientists and well known to the
Tusk as catastrophe deniers. You addressed some of Morrison’s objections to
your understanding of the situation a few years back, comments which can be
found here
in the Tusk for those interested. What fascinates me is how these three
have built careers (See also: Plait, Phil and Boslough, Mark) based on
conflicting public contentions. To wit: The cosmic threat is dangerous enough
for them to write books and give speeches about, but not so dangerous the
public should be genuinely concerned. And it’s awkward companion message: The
impact threat is so well constrained there is no room for scholarly
disagreement, yet their field desperately needs further funding because…there is
still “so much we don’t know!” Are these guys scientists — or intellectual
contortionists?

BN: My
guess would be that they want to steer a course between alarmism and
complacency (the giggle factor), and that different aspects of the celestial
hazard issue are emphasised depending on the audience and the context. However,
more to the point, their model fails to predict the YDB phenomena. If the YDB
teams are right, the CMH model is up against a real problem. It also fails to
account for (and the protagonists continue to ignore):

1) Not just
the whole array of YDB evidence, but also that of Marie Agnes Courty,
indicating that major cosmic disturbances of some sort took place 12,800 BP and
2350 BC, the latter collapsing the earliest civilisations.

2) The
evidence, decades-old now and not even controversial amongst the comet
community, that an exceptionally large, low-inclination, short-period comet has
been orbiting in our neighbourhood for about 20,000 years. The massive Canadian
meteor survey of Peter Brown and colleagues, for example, confirming this, has
been simply ignored by the CMH group. And yet in such a disintegrating
environment there is a reasonable probability of a catastrophic encounter with
debris in the comet trail. In this connection my colleagues have further
material upcoming.

3) The
finding that large bodies leak inwards from beyond the edge of the planetary
system, entering unstable orbits which yield large Earth-crossing comets at a
calculable rate, and that the inner interplanetary environment is thus subject
to substantial mass enhancements (factor of 100 or more) at intervals
comparable with the timescale of civilisation to date.

4) Impact
cratering statistics, using the best extant data, demonstrating the existence
of bombardment episodes throughout geological history, most easily explained as
giant comet breakup and specifically not explicable by asteroid breakup or Oort
cloud disturbance. For example the 24 km Boltysh crater in the Ukraine crater
in the Ukraine was formed within 2000-3000 years of the Chicxulub impact
crater; the odds of this synchronicity being down to chance are 2500 to one
against for this pair alone, 1000 to one against for the Popigai/Chesapeake
pair and so on.

If
the silence on these points is like something out of Kafka, such
counter-arguments as we have heard are like something out of Mickey Mouse
[emphasis CT].
The “it’s impossible” argument continues to be presented years after its
deficiencies have been pointed out and a working model described in the
peer-reviewed literature; one protagonist’s answer to a journalist’s question
about the evidence for bombardment episodes (a Bayesian analysis which survived
tough refereeing) was that he could draw dinosaurs in the sky by joining up
stars; and another’s objection to our long-running Taurid complex studies was
that “colleagues who do dynamics” find them unreasonable. Anonymous colleagues
giving unspecified reasons: maybe more Kafka than Mouse.

CT:
Outside astronomical evidence what do you personally find most convincing of
catastrophe in human times, given the array of evidence you have reviewed over
the decades?

BN: It’s
always hard to evaluate evidence in fields outside one’s own, but to me the
continuing accumulation of impact proxies by independent groups – melt glass,
nanodiamonds, Greenland platinum spike and so on – provides compelling evidence
that a cosmic input of some sort occurred at the onset of the YD cooling. And
the finding by the Belmont group of a second nanodiamond peak a few thousand
years in the past is exciting: it strengthens Marie Agnes Courty’s long-running
contention that of a more recent event at 2350 BC, again coincident with a
widespread cooling, and drought, sufficient to bring about the collapse of the
earliest civilisations.

CT: I
understand you have several writing projects underway. What can we expect to
see from you in the future?

BN: A review
article Centaurs as a hazard to civilisation by a bunch of us is due for
publication in the December 2015 issue of Astronomy & Geophysics, an
in-house journal of the Royal Astronomical Society. We have things to say,
inter alia, about the Chapman/Harris/Morrison model. Once published, I
anticipate it will become widely available.

I have a
popular science manuscript, provisionally entitled Cosmic Roulette, which
covers the issue of humanity’s vulnerability in the cosmic environment.
Tusk-like material is, of course, a conspicuous feature of the book. I still
have a chapter or so to finish off.

I’ve also
resumed my fiction writing after a long layoff due to research commitments, and
have completed two thriller manuscripts. The Younger Dryas boundary issue plays
an important part in The Doomsday Vault (the fictional scientists therein have
no connection to any real ones!), and Meltdown is partially set in the Syrian
desert.

All three
manuscripts have now gone to an agency, and I’m awaiting their response.

CT:
Bill, thank you so very much. I am a horrible novel reader but certainly will
be reading The Doomsday Vault. And pimping it here on the Tusk!

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10 comments:

For the most part, history is simply a socially accepted STORY, or fairy-tale, or myth etc... Certainly there are some facts disseminated here and there to keep it all interesting but for the most part our entire society and probably most societies throughout the ages were and are based mostly on easily repudiated opinions about what happened or didn't happen. The so called elite who own the gold and all the pretty stuff used their PR firms to concoct a story about their divine right as kings fairy-tale to keep the perception of power in their corner. History is like a big theatrical play and the producers of the play hire the best writers of scripts that tell stories that are favorable to the self proclaimed rulers and or producers of the play. In other words, I'd have to say that the majority of society and it's hi(story) are based on LIES, hence we have a lie based society today. If you have a young child, and you want to become a respected member of out sick society based on fiction you better teach them to lie, send them to acting school, fictional writing class, set them up with great costumes of authority, and send them off to law (lie) school. If you're really smart you'll ignore the so called great fictional society as you enter the reality zone, and send your child to learn a craft, like electrical engineering, carpentry, plumbing, farming, etc. something practical that actually helps others. Keep the BS of history and todays society in the imagination of the scribes of fiction, the actors, the magicians of make believe.... I actually flunked out of every history class I ever attended, but as I vaguely recall I never really attended, oh I was there all right, but I was more concerned with the quality of the weed I was smoking and the pretty girl next to me than I was with all the crap I was learning in school.

It does make one wonder,what civilizations were truly like before the catastrophes.And as the article posted yesterday in New Illuminati proposed, did these global catastrophes become embedded in our human DNA? I think so. In thinking of our prehistoric ancestors, I found the following video to be quite interesting.It details how prehistoric art and the myths of the gods & goddesses could have directly related to how differently prehistoric planetary alignment might have been. I am grateful for such pioneers into ancient history. There is a big chunk of history in which we have yet to recover. Here is David Talbott's first glimpses of celestial dramas in ancient times. vid- Just a few thousand years ago a gathering of planets hung as towering forms in the ancient sky close to the earth, provoking spectacular electric discharge formations above our forebears. Could this be true? 1 hr,18 minhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7EAlTcZFwY

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